I’ve hiked 20+ different trails/parks in Georgia, so it was bound to happen eventually. I got lost.

I was hiking at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, and I decided to take a route that I’ve hiked several times. I’d always gone one direction, but today I tried the opposite direction. At the halfway point, you cross over the main road very close to an intersection. They’ve been doing some construction on that intersection and they’ve rerouted the trail.

I headed down what I thought was the correct trail, but it just dwindled away to almost nothing, then connected to an open field. I followed the “trail” around the edge of the clearing, which I then found out just circled the clearing. I also discovered that I couldn’t find where I had entered the clearing.

The one thing that saved me was that I was still, relatively speaking, near the road, and I was able to follow the sound of traffic back to the pavement.

Since I was never really lost (Hey! I knew where to go, just not where I was!), I was not overly concerned and spent most of the time just laughing at myself.